Increasingly, high school students purchase and own their very own phones that they can fill with a variety of applications such as games and meditation apps. With a limited amount of storage, it can be crucial to find the right apps to download to help enhance all parts of your life. Here are some useful apps separated into categories.

• Busuu
This is one of the best apps for learning languages! It offers lessons for 9 languages, including French, Japanese, Chinese, and English. Due to the diversity of users speaking different languages, Busuu allows native speakers to mark their writing or speaking practices. Students are able to work on key skills such as grammar, vocabulary, reading, and writing at their own pace by selecting the right level (easy to difficult) for them. To fortify students’ vocabulary memorization, Busuu creates a vocabulary review section where students review all the vocabulary they have learned. Upon finishing the review, the words are categorized into 3 distinct levels: weak, medium, and strong. This helps students identify which vocabulary words to focus on. In addition, one distinguishing feature of Bussu is that it is free! However, students still have to pay a fee to unlock more practices if they would like. Fortunately, the fee is relatively cheaper than those of other language learning apps.

• Forest
Cell-phones can be a distraction to students who are trying to focus on finishing tasks. Forest is an app that can lock your cell-phone while you are working. When a tomato clock is set up, the cell phone will lock up, preventing notifications from all apps with the exception of incoming phone calls. If there are some apps that you would like to be kept open, students have the option of adding some apps to the list of apps that remain open.

What separates Forest from other time management apps is its gameplay. Once a student starts a tomato clock, a tree is planted. If a student opens an app that is not on the whitelist during the countdown, the tree will wither. For even greater motivation, as more trees are planted on the Forest app, more real trees will be planted in the real world as a reward.

• TickTick: Todo List Planner
Ticktick is also a time management app. It resembles an advanced version of a digital calendar which focuses on recording required tasks and reminding the user to finish these tasks. TickTick also features a clock to help users concentrate when working on one of the required tasks.The best feature of TickTick is its plug-in program on the cell-phone’s desktop. Every time a student unlocks their phone, they are able to view all required tasks without even opening the app.

• Khan Academy
Khan Academy is an app that provides thousands of instructional videos for different high school courses, including math, history, physics, and more. It even includes lectures and practice lessons for AP courses. If students fail to remember lessons or struggle to fully understand concepts taught in the class, they can search it up and receive further support on Khan Academy. Khan Academy is an app that is completely free. There is no fee required to access any material in the app.

• Snapseed
Snapseed is a photo-editing app. It is cheaper and easier to use compared to Photoshop or Lighthouse, and it has more functions than Instagram. Multiple filters are included in the app. It is even possible to create customized filters by adjusting the lightings and colours. All functions are free and there are multiple options for import.

• Alarmy
Alarmy is a creative alarm app. If one alarm does not meet people’s need to regain consciousness, Alarmy will be a better option. In addition to the regular alarm, Alarmy needs the users to complete a task to shut down the alarm. The task can be a puzzle, a math problem, a trivia question, etc. If the task is not solved, users cannot shut down the alarm. What makes Alarmy more appealing is its setting of alarms. The volume of the alarm is relatively low at first and it increases gradually to wake the user up. This reduces the surprise and the discomfort of the user when woken by a loud alarm.